Tourist

Astralwerks; 2005

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I sincerely hope everything's going okay for the guys in Athlete. Less than two years after their debut Vehicles & Animals, the band have dropped the sunny guitars, quirky vocals, and Coldplay comparisons for keyboards, strings, and mini-series melodrama. On Tourist, Athlete become radical neo-Britpop fundamentalists according to the gospel of "Trouble" and "The Scientist". At times they tell sob stories so terrifically upsetting that even their detractors have trouble keeping tears from jerking.

The catalyst for this transformation was lead single "Wires", the stringy super-ballad leadman Joel Pott penned after his prematurely born daughter suffered from epileptic attacks. "You got wires, goin' in/ You got wires, comin' out of your skin/ You got tears, making tracks/ I got tears, that are scared of the facts," he whispers. It's the best song about childbirth since Creed's "With Arms Wide Open", though considering that song can't even hold a candle to Live's "Lightning Crashes", that's not saying much.

Drama in music works perfectly fine in mediated, tactical doses, but for Tourist, the stakes are unrealistically high. Every song aspires for that movie scene where the guy, after finding his estranged father and kicking his drug habit, is reunited with his girlfriend...in an airport. Athlete abuse the soft verse/loud chorus trick to no end, leadoff track "Chances" being the biggest culprit. After Potts sings, "Maybe there's a chance our walls might fall," a flurry of strings swiped from The Flaming Lips' "Race for the Prize" are formulaically cued. Potts then repeats the refrain until he's squeezed every drop of sentimentality from the line "Take me over." The final result is a safe cry-by-number, reproducible for a full album.

Here's the kicker: For a band that tries so hard lyrically, Athlete feel no pressure to experiment with their songwriting. Potts' best attempt at a hook here is to hold a note over swelling strings. Athlete were never a particularly innovative band, but even Vehicles & Animals's flimsy IDM preferred to Tourist's homophonous gloom. Athlete, you have my deepest condolences.